The death of Helen Hughes at the age of 84 brought to an end a remarkable life, but also left Australia a formidable legacy. Born in Prague in 1928, she moved with her family to Australia in 1939, settling in Melbourne. Educated at Mac.Robertson Girls’ High School and Melbourne University, Helen earned a doctorate from the London School of Economics and went on to become Australia’s most eminent female economist, working for various universities and institutions at home and abroad. Her achievements are many and well-documented.

Like many of her vintage, Helen had been on an intellectual and ideological journey, starting out as a Marxist, ending up as a classical liberal. But what remained constant throughout her life was her passionate advocacy on behalf of the poor and the powerless. Exploitation angered her; but over time, she came to realise that the poor are never more vulnerable than when at the mercy of politicians and government bureaucrats. By the end of her life, she was arguing that private property rights and the free market were not the cause of poor people’s problems, but were the crucial precondition for solving them.

Helen became a distinguished academic economist at a time when a woman in that profession was very much a rarity. I first met her in 1985 when she spoke in Sydney at a meeting of the free-market Mont Pelerin Society that I had organised. Our paths didn’t cross again until 1994 when we both attended a conference in Jakarta. She soon began to participate in the work of the Centre for Independent Studies, where she became a senior fellow. The early days focused on what she knew best, namely development economics with a particular focus on the Pacific. Her publications were too numerous to mention here, but a search of our website will turn up pages and pages of papers, books, articles and opinion pieces.

Her work on Pacific development issues had led to her becoming an authority on Nauru, and she had negotiated new arrangements for the distribution of mining royalties. There were also important lessons in this which she would recall in her later work on Indigenous Australia. That lesson was that while the royalty income flowing to Nauruans collectively was substantial, in the absence of property rights and individual ownership and accounts, communal funds ultimately led to disaster, with billions being wasted on often hare-brained schemes. Does anyone remember Leonardo the Musical or the disastrous ‘investment’ in the now defunct Fitzroy AFL club?

An interview with Helen on the ABC concerning Nauru was heard by at least one critical observer of the situation in Arnhem Land. Helen’s description of the economic and social conditions in Nauru reminded Jenness Warin of what it was like in so many parts of the Northern Territory. Jenness, a nurse educator and one of the unsung heroines of the change in understanding of Indigenous issues, visited CIS with Kathy Marawili from the community of Baniyala in East Arnhem Land to meet with Helen. The meeting was held in the Centre’s P.P. McGuinness Library. My office is next to the library and I could hear much of the animated conversation. The gist of the discussion led Helen to conclude that while the Pacific indeed had many problems, Australia had many of its own. We were a first world country with some of our citizens living in the worst of conditions. To Helen, this was an outrage.

March 2005 saw her first substantial foray into the fraught world of Indigenous policy. It would occupy her to the very end. ‘A New Deal for Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders in Remote Communities’, co-authored with Jenness Warin, set out the problem in the very first sentence of the executive summary: ‘Since the 1970s, Australia has been conducting a socialist experiment in remote communities with the lives of Aborigines and Torres Strait Islanders.’ Helen spent the next eight years writing on what she believed were the key issues for reform: education, housing, property rights (‘nowhere in the world has communal land ownership ever led to economic development’), health, crime and justice. The amount she wrote was breathtaking.

Perhaps the most important of all her works in this area for CIS was the most substantial, and not just in size. The 2007 book Lands of Shame was an assault on the many interests that had, as she saw it, resulted in shameful prospects for some of our poorest fellow Australians. It was a book of ideas as well as a book of policy prescriptions. It has been immensely influential and its targets have been more than a little discomfited, as they should be, by her telling description of the national disgrace Indigenous policy had become.

At her death, Helen was working on a new Lands of Shame. In one of her last emails, she said the new book ‘wraps up all the CIS work … since 2005. We have come a long way in understanding the issues since Jenness’s and my paper.’ That wasn’t all. There was to be a book of Indigenous statistics; an Indigenous ‘State of the Nation’ to be completed with her son Mark, who co-authored many of her recent papers.

Helen was a tough and uncompromising observer of the world and the battle of ideas. Cross her, or present inadequate analysis, and you would feel the rough side of her intellect and the harsh edge of her tongue. Her standards were the highest, but if you were willing to learn, argue and work hard, she was encouraging and liberal with praise. Colleagues, both at the CIS and elsewhere, will attest to the time spent and benefits of Helen’s mentoring, hectoring and guidance, which helped shape the careers of many young researchers.

Among the many tributes the CIS has received, this one explains why Helen was unique: ‘Such a good woman, always inspiring and motivating, as I’m sure everybody who worked with her would be fully aware. But everything she fought for and believed in will not be forgotten, I fervently hope. Such
a good dear friend and mentor.’